CARDINAL Henry Manning on “The Sin Unto Death” (1874):

ALL the actions of a man in a state of mortal sin are dead; they have no merit or power to prevail before God for his salvation. So long as he is separated from God, nothing he does has saving power. Just as a tree that has life bears living fruit, and a tree that is dead has nothing but fruit that is withered and dead likewise, so a soul that is planted in God, as we all are by baptism, strikes its root as the tree by the rivers of water, and increases continually in faith, hope, and charity, and in the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, which expand themselves like the leaves upon the branch, and the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost unfold themselves and ripen. On the other hand, a soul that is separated from God is like the tree that is cut asunder at the root, and as the severed tree withers from the topmost spray and every fruit upon it dies, so the soul in the state of mortal sin, of whatsoever kind, so long as it remains in that state, is separated from God, and can bear no fruit unto salvation. (more…)

ELIZABETH POWERS writes: I had visited your site on a different subject, but noticed your post on "Intellectual Revolutions." I recently read a book that might interest you in connection with that post. It is by Frances O’Gorman and is entitled Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History. He has some interesting observations about why people can’t be talked out of what they believe, as belief is a matter not of reason, but of emotion or faith or the like: it is sort of pre-cognitive, you might say. It’s insightful in connection with today’s hyper-partisan atmosphere. Minds cannot be changed by reasoned argument! Coming to intellectual change takes inner muscles. Best wishes for a healthy New Year. Your blog is very lovely.

"WHAT a coincidence that just when news leaks out of a coordinated US, Saudi, and Israeli plan to undermine the Iranian government we see the largest protests in Iran since 2009! We are told that thousands of people carefully coordinated protests in multiple cities throughout the country over a hike in the price of eggs and that there were absolutely no foreign fingerprints on the unrest. Do you believe it?" Tune in to Daniel McAdams and Ron Paul on the issue. Educate yourself about how Americans are conned into going to war.

  JAMES PERLOFF discusses World War II in this lengthy interview. A commenter at Youtube writes: My family were refugees from the Nazi's [sic] and Stalin. As a child I believed everything I was taught at school. My elders would gently correct me, but I would shout them down and say they were anti-semitic, even my Aunty Ruth (Jewish, holocaust survivor). Now I am finding all this new information and all my articles of faith fall away, I am left with the view of the war my elders tried to share with me. They are all dead now and I can't even apologise.

THE ISRAELI Defense Minister Avgidor Lieberman has recommended that 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi spend the rest of her life in jail. Her offense? Slapping heavily-armed Israeli soldiers. A prominent Israeli journalist has recommended that she be raped.

Read about the activist’s story here at the International Middle East Media Center:

On Monday, one day after her 21 year old cousin Nour was charged with assaulting an Israeli soldier, 16-year old Ahed was also charged with the same crime, along with ‘interfering with a soldier’s duties’ and stone throwing.

The charges came after Ahed, her cousin and her mother were seen on a video posted on the internet pushing a soldier off their property, just after 14-year old Mohammed Tamimi was shot point-blank in the face by a rubber-coated steel bullet, losing an eye and part of his face, and requiring surgery to remove part of his skull.

Jonathan Ofir writes:

I am going to talk about another slap that has hardly featured in any coverage of this case – a hard slap that was given to Ahed Tamimi by the ‘restrained’ soldier, just 5 seconds before her now-famous slap back to the soldier from Ahed. (more…)

THIS sermon by Bishop Donald Sandborn on the "Dignity of Motherhood" makes important points on that subject, but I was especially struck by what he says about marriages that go bad. How is that people who are so in love can come to hate each other? Starting at minute 3:00, he explains why this often happens. "Just as after a meal we are disgusted with the thought of eating more of what we passionately desired before the meal, so human beings who have worn out their appetites for each other actually become disgusted with each other."

  ANOTHER famous waltz -- this one by the French composer Emile Waldteufel (1837-1915) -- for New Year's Day.

  EVERY YEAR, the Vienna Philharmonic celebrates the New Year with a special concert featuring the waltzes of Johann Strauss II. Here is one of the standards, "The Blue Danube," from last year. The extremely popular waltz was composed in 1866 and the words were later added by the Vienna Men's Choral Association: Danube so blue, so bright and blue, through vale and field you flow so calm, our Vienna greets you, your silver stream through all the lands you merry the heart with your beautiful shores. Far from the Black Forest you hurry to the sea giving your blessing to everything. Eastward you flow, welcoming your brothers, A picture of peace for all time! Old castles looking down from high, greet you smiling from their steep and craggy hilltops, and the mountains' vistas mirror in your dancing waves. See my 2012 post on the Vienna Philharmonic, which was all-male longer than most orchestras. Happy New Year!

OKAY, so you won’t find a truly beautiful and modest dress on the cover of Vogue. 

But you can find literally thousands of examples in the great paintings. Here is just one: “The Flower Girl” by the Peruvian artist Albert Lynch. (more…)

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS on “The Feminist Threat to Men and Women:”

It was the feminists who said that putting women on a pedestal was the male’s way of disempowering women. What ignorant nonsense. The most powerful members of my family were my grandmothers, mother, and aunts. Little decisions they left to the men. The big decisions they made.

Feminists said that women had to reject the pedestal and come down into the male world and prove their worth. It never occurred to feminists that women had more worth and more power on the pedestal. Feminists taught women to be promiscuous. Cosmopolitan magazine taught women to find fulfillment in orgasm with as many sexual partners as they can find. A number of years ago I wrote about young men telling me that they would like to get married, but every woman they knew had been in bed with all of their classmates. They said they would feel funny having their friends at their wedding who had sexual experience with their bride. (more…)

RUMOR has been afoot in the last couple of months of a major operation against the globalist gangsters. Do these rumors have any substance?

The Anti-New York Times has an important entry today about a poster at the forum known as “4chan” who goes by the name of Q and claims to be “a high-level government insider with special ‘Q clearance’ (hence the name) tasked with posting ‘crumbs’ for the purpose of covertly informing patriots about Donald Trump’s master plan to rout the Deep State and the whole Globalist-Rothschild structure above them.”

Some of Q’s predictions appear to have been fulfilled with a plane crash at the Rothschild estate, the sudden disappearance of George Soros from his Twitter account and odd behavior by various politicians, including Hillary and John McCain. From The Anti-New York Times:

Could it really be that Globalist gangsters are being investigated, arrested and even killed? If so, are the military & law enforcement “White Hats” coming to our rescue, or is this just part of a factional war Zionist vs Globalist war amongst competing gangsters? Are Trump’s repeated two-hand drinking episodes that have so amused the late night commie-comics a signal that people are being placed in handcuffs and sent to prison? Is the growing military-backed power of Trump the reason why GOP anti-Trumpers such as Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham are suddenly working with and even praising Trump? What’s going on here?

Who can say for sure at this point. But what we will say with certainty is that something big is taking shape — and Q, regardless of his ultimate intentions, should not be ignored.

It seems too good to be true, but some old-fashioned, cautious optimism, laced with a lot of skepticism, is in order. (more…)

  ALL WEEK I hoped to get to the computer to wish readers a happy Christmas -- but I never made it. Christmas, of course, is not over. At least, I hope it is not over for you. May the Christ child fill your hearts with confidence and courage this season and throughout the coming year. Welcome, all wonders in one sight! Eternity shut in a span; Summer in winter; day in night; Heaven in earth, and God in man. Great little one, whose all-embracing birth Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth. --- From "The Holy Nativity of Our Lord" by Richard Crashaw (1612-1649)

On Christmas Eve that year, we visited my grandfather in his room at a nursing home atop a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. A picture taken there shows him bedridden and surrounded by his five children and two grandchildren. My cousin and I are now the only ones still alive from that evening. Thirty-six years later, I went back to that spot and sat on a park bench overlooking the river, thinking about the last weeks of his life in a room just a few yards away. He lived from the age of hot-air balloon ascensions to the age of manned spaceflight. I often regretted not asking him what he thought about the obvious absence of moral progress concurrent with that remarkable technological progress. --- From When I Was Seventeen by Alan

CHRISTMAS (II)
— George Herbert (1593-1633)

THE shepherds sing; and shall I silent be?

        My God, no hymn for Thee?

My soul’s a shepherd too; a flock it feeds

         Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.

The pasture is Thy word: the streams, Thy grace

        Enriching all the place.

Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers

        Outsing the daylight hours. (more…)

  ANGELIKA Graswald posted the above photo on her Facebook page on April 26, 2015, a few days after her "fiancé's" kayak capsized in the icy waters of the Hudson River, resulting in his drowning. Five months ago she pled guilty to criminally negligent homicide. She sabotaged the kayak of Vincent Viafore, who would have been her third "husband," and refused to offer him aid. Miss Graswald was released from jail this week. She spent 32 months in prison. She is a free woman.

  "I'M dreaming of a Francis Christmas .... with no real Catholics in my sight. May your days be merry and briiiiiiight, what once was good is bad and wrongs now right."

  MODERNISM -- that "synthesis of all heresies" -- embraces ugliness. It insists upon ugliness. It cannot produce anything but ugliness. See the extensive commentary at Novus Ordo Watch on the nativity scene at St. Peter's Square as a prime example of the in-your-face ugliness of religious modernism: All in all, we may say that this “Nativity” display looks more like a scene from hell, and that is no accident. Always keep that in mind: This is all deliberate. Things like this do not just happen; they require official approval and are planned long in advance, and every detail is thought through and prepared carefully. The Vatican authorities could have made this Nativity scene as beautiful as the world knows how, and yet this is what they chose to present. Think about that. The conclusion is inescapable: The ugliness, the repulsiveness, the twistedness of it all, is by design. These wicked Vatican Modernists are simply seeking as much as possible to distract from the Birth of Christ and render it repulsive to people, especially to children. Would you let your sweet little ones look at, much less approach, this travesty of a Nativity scene? What child would not be frightened and disturbed? As their impressionable little minds and vulnerable, tender souls draw near to the Christ Child to love, thank, and adore Him, they’re being repelled by all these grim-looking, frightening characters, not excluding nudity — and the poor children will associate this with Christmas going forward.…